Who Made God?

This page is more or less an intellectual piece and you can safely skip it if you don't like intellectual stuff and just want to get onto spiritual things …

Ok then…

Some atheists like to say, "If God made everything, then who made God?" Some atheists like to argue that the existence of "God" explains nothing of the wonder we see in the physical Universe today – because the actual existence of "God" could explain everything. For them, its just an explanation of everything and anything which makes superstitious and feeble-minded people too lazy to go after REAL answers. For most atheists, real answers can only be found ultimately in something they call "Science".

People who believe in creation sometimes point out the incredible IMPROBABILITY of things as complex and information-rich as we see in the Universe today. This is seen as an argument for the existence of a Creator. To which some atheists, most notably perhaps people like Richard Dawkins, will point out that if the physical Universe is improbable because it is complex, then how much more improbable must GOD be, since He must, if He exists, be more complex than the Universe itself.

This, for Dawkins, means that God probably doesn't exist. In fact, I'm sure Dawkins will go further and say that he KNOWS God does not exist. How very clever of him.

These kind of arguments are supposed to be "knock-down" arguments against theists (those who believe that God exists).

I would like to show that these arguments are not as smart as they sound.

What is important to understand is that every person in the way they think generally work with some unspoken ASSUMPTIONS which are taken on board even before the reasoning process begins.

Philosophers call these 'a priori' assumptions. Some people would perhaps want to say that they don't have any 'a priori' assumptions – that everything that they believe they believe on the basis of objective realities which cannot be reasonably denied. To this I say: "Hogwash".

Most of us assume that the things we see with our eyes really exist – but this may not always be true in fact.

We assume that our memories of the past were not implanted in us 5 seconds ago, but have a correspondence to "objective reality".

We assume that our thought processes are capable of guiding us to true conclusions.

And many other things we likewise assume.

A lot of atheists actually start with an 'a priori' assumption that there is no spiritual realm. That is, they ASSUME that nothing exists that is not physical and open to scientific investigation. From there they say that since in the physical world every possible effect has a cause, God also, if he exists, must have a cause. Hence the question: "Who made God?".

This is just so much circular reasoning. You start with an ASSUMPTION that there is no spiritual world (hence, goodbye God), and then you conclude that "there is no God", 'proving' your initial assumption. Big deal.

As long as atheists want to insist that all reasonable people will accept their 'a priori' assumptions, such as there not being a spiritual world, then there is no possibility of reasonable discussion. As Christians, we cannot adopt the false ASSUMPTIONS of atheists before we enter into discussion with them!

Questions like "Who made God?" are hard to answer because the question itself ASSUMES something that in our view and experience at least, isn't true. What if we define God as the "Uncreated Creator of the Universe"? The question "Who made God" them becomes "Who made the Uncreated Creator?" If God is uncreated then the question doesn't make sense. The person who asks it is actually smuggling in ASSUMPTIONS like "everything has to have an antecedent cause". Really? Says who?

Atheists generally have assumed way more than they have proved.

They assume that things have always moved from simple to complex systems.

Many assume that "nothing" or perhaps some kind of nebulous "quantum fluctuation" coming from nowhere can cause "something" to come into existence for no reason. Or they assume that the Universe has always existed – something modern cosmology seriously doubts.

Why should we buy into the assumptions of modern atheists?
Why should we believe that matter preceded mind?
Why should we believe that complex specified mult-part machines are capable of forming themselves out of particles which in turn exist for no apparent reason?

Why should we? To get a Government Research Grant perhaps? To win the respect of like-minded people?

German mathematician Kurt Godel demonstrated that in any sufficiently powerful formal system of logic or mathematics, there are propositions which are true but they CANNOT be proved within the rules of the system itself. In the same way, there are things concerning the physical universe we live in which are true, but cannot be PROVED by reference to any system of RULES which may or may not describe the operation of the Universe we live in. This is in fact the case because there is a SPIRITUAL world which in many ways controls and influences the operation of things in the 4 dimensions we are familiar with in our physical world.

There are definitely LIMITS to human knowledge. We see it in physics with things like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

We see it in Mathematics with Godel's theorem. And its true in more tenuous areas like philosophy as well.

I maintain that every single person's thoughts are influenced by RELIGIOUS pre-suppositions in one form or another. The question is whether these pre-suppositions have come for any good reason or not.

As Christians, we need not be afraid of the rantings of atheists. The more you look into their belief systems and critically evaluate their level of intellectual honesty, the more you will be confident that believing in God is nothing to be ashamed of for a thinking person.

For further reading I suggest taking a look at the book "Who Made God?" by Prof. Edgar Andrews B.Sc., Ph.D, D.Sc., a physicist of no mean repute. Another book I'd also recommend if you want to see the kind of tactics used by modern atheists would be "Darwin Strikes Back" by Thomas Woodward, a historian of the Intelligent Design movement.